I had massaged an ebook yesterday which looked good in both Sigil and calibre viewer; BUT when viewed in ADE and Sony Reader Library (PC) every paragraph was underlined. Further inspection with Sigil I found each paragraph began with <a> and ended with </a>. Removal of the <a></a> produced paragraphs without underlining.

Therefore, why did this show in ADE and Sony Reader Library (PC) and not in Sigil or calibre viewer?

I had massaged an ebook yesterday which looked good in both Sigil and calibre viewer; BUT when viewed in ADE and Sony Reader Library (PC) every paragraph was underlined. Further inspection with Sigil I found each paragraph began with <a> and ended with </a>. Removal of the <a></a> produced paragraphs without underlining.

Therefore, why did this show in ADE and Sony Reader Library (PC) and not in Sigil or calibre viewer?

Thanks.

Now you see why Sigil is not the last word (usually it looks great in Sigil and does not work at all in ADE).

Both Sigil and Calibre use the same rendering engine, which is why similar looks.

I'm guessing WebKit ignores pointless anchor tags. There could also be CSS involved that only underlines anchor tags having href attributes which is being ignored by ADE (and honored by WebKit) for a variety of reasons.

a tags like that, which are not used as links; a is for anchor, anchors to link back to specific paragraphs from notes and such usually - often just spammed everywhere by an automatic process to make sure references will work.

The styling of an a tag without a link to something is meant to not be underlined, but some renders assume they're always going to be used as links. The render in Sigil is correct in this case.